Top 120 Historian Quotes

I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.

Here’s one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

I am no historian, but Hungary is a country which has never known democracy – and by that, I mean not a democratic political system, but an organic process which has mobilised the entire country’s society. In the case of Hungary, this development was blocked by the growth of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn’t be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you’re trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.

I’m a historian, and that freaks me out.

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas’ gambling interests and criminal connections.

I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

I’m a historian in my own mind.

As a natural historian, I don’t believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

Popularizing – much less venturing beyond one’s secure turf – was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was – and knew I was – among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don’t mean I was the best historian – a quite different measure.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What’s the same and what’s different?

The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

Yes, I’m a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and ’40s. I’ve never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn’t know what to say about contemporary society.

As a historian, I’ve spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

Those who read the fiction assume that, because I’m also a historian, I know what I’m talking about.

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

I’m a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event – and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

I ain’t no historian but I happen to savvy this incident.

I’m not a historian. I know historians. I’ve worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.

There were various turning points, but the main one at the beginning was that I was going off to do another degree in the history of art. I would have ended up as some art historian at Sotheby’s or something.

You don’t have to be a brilliant historian to know that in Europe, messing with countries’ borders, messing with their self-determination, their ability to choose their own futures, this is extremely dangerous, and that’s why I think it is important to stand up to Putin.

Steve Van Zandt is a very intelligent, smart guy. He’s a historian, he knows a lot about rock n’ roll, a lot about music.

‘Wolf Hall’ attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian’s research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

Because I’m an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That’s what really art history is. You’re looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

I didn’t realize the president was such an historian.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

It’s the historian’s job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.

I wanted to work in the arts. My dream come true would be to be an architectural historian and work with the royal palaces and all the fabulous art collections. But I’m not committed enough.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

As a historian, I’m sceptical about conspiracy theories because the world is far too complicated to be managed by a few billionaires drinking scotch behind some closed doors. But I do think that the voters are correct in sensing that they’re really losing power. And in reaction, they give the system an angry kick.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I’m a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn’t want to be a journalist – I wanted to be a historian.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to ’95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it’s not written by an art historian.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

Oh no, I’m not a historian or anything like that.

The search for the truth for truth’s sake is the mark of the historian.

I’m a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I’ve been studying Naval battles forever.

But I’m a historian. I wasn’t interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

I haven’t studied history – I couldn’t give a discourse in medieval literature – but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.

So with truth – there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there’s never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

The novelist’s obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian’s. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup – a little went a long way. Like cilantro.